Top iOS Apps Of The Week

Browsing the App Store can be a bit overwhelming. Which apps are new? Which ones are good? Are the paid ones worth paying for, or do they have a free, lite version that will work well enough?

Well, if you stop interrogating me for a second, hypothetical App Store shopper, I can tell you about this thing we do here.

Every week, we highlight some of the most interesting new apps and collect them here for your consideration. This time, our picks include _____, _____, and _____.

Here you go:

Idea Maker Flashcards is a new app that hopes to get your creativity going by showing you different ways to think about and approach your work. It also includes video examples of each of them for you visual learners out there.

It’s intended mostly for marketers and public-relations folks, but even people outside of those industries might be interested in some of the projects. Like the story of the Dortmund Concert Hall, which raised its attendance and membership by selling milk from cows that had listened to the upcoming symphonic program.

Picking the right word can be challenging. Or maybe you’re just trying to make yourself sound smart by using something that would be a formidable figure on a Scrabble board. Either way, Thesaurasize can get you those synonyms but quick. All you do is type in the boring word you’re starting with, and it spits out a list of other candidates.

Just make sure you read the definitions Thesaurasize provides so that you know what the synonyms mean, though. You don’t want come off sounding fatuitous.

I’ve always been interested in origami, but it’s been hard to find directions that consistently make sense. It’s all dashed lines and dotted lines and arrows pointing in vague directions, and it’s supposed to be relaxing, damn it. But Origami Club is here to help you out with video tutorials in which a pair of helping hands walk you through the entire process, even pausing occasionally to point out details on potentially complicated steps.

The videos are also surprisingly calming just to watch even if you don’t end up with a little mouse or whatever. But I think you want to end up with a little mouse.

Your days of endlessly hitting “Refresh” to see if a price has come down may be over (unless you like that sort of thing). Punchr is a new app that will monitor any part of a web page for updates and then let you know when it happens. You just navigate to the site and then select the part of it you want to look out for, and it’ll send you a push notification if something changes.

So now you can spend less time refreshing Twitter when it’s down and more time taking pictures of your lunch to post on Twitter when it returns.

I don’t have a lot of time to read, so it’s always nice to find an app to help me out there. SprintReader employs <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_serial_visual_presentation”rapid serial visual presentation to let you read one of a selection of classic (i.e. public-domain) works with haste.

You get a box, and the words appear one at a time. They always appear in the same place, so you just plunk your eyes there and let the text come to you. The selections are a bit limited right now, but if you’ve never read Pride and Prejudice or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, now might be a good time.